Repayment
by cluekitty
Summary: "I've done things Ma, and those memories hang heavy on my heart" Jack attempts to find purpose and redemption in war-torn Europe.  ONE SHOT


Dear Ma,

I'm writing you to tell you how I am. All the other boys here do too, but of course, their parents are alive. I guess it's a kind of reassurance. Is for me, cause I know you're watching over me, but hell, shall I tell you a story Ma? I know you can't read it, but even in your last days, when you were wreaked with that damned cough you always listened to my stories. If you're reading this Pa, and you're probably reading to Ma and Sissy, I know you weren't never interested in my stories, but those were stories from books. I guess this is my story now. I hope you're interested Pa.

Three years after Pa went, and not soon after Ma, a war broke out. It weren't in America, but in Europe, but I decided to go. I wanted to get away from everything. When I say everything, I mean, everything. The dust, the flies, your graves on top of the mount behind the barn. Newspapers stated it was a useless war, and it would be over before Christmas. European rulers are all related anyway, it's all angry family matters. And I thought I would get glory and explore the world, and I guess, pay for taking a father and husband from a family, even if the bastard deserved it. Grandpa was Scottish anyway, so I reckoned that when Britain got involved I ought to go on. It weren't my country but I wanted to get away from my own. So I went.

I arrived in Southampton just before Christmas, expecting it almost to be already over, and it was real easy to join up. I mean, real easy. Men were lining up to join. I ain't never seen anything like it. We "trained" for a grand total of less than fifteen weeks. Some of the kids here are younger than me, at seventeen or sixteen, but they're the new kids that are down here at the moment. I enlisted real early, with the older men, when the kids were still being rejected. But I survived, and they didn't. Figures most didn't have the same up-bringing I did.

I was nicknamed "Cowboy". I guess I'm a novelty here parts, but to be honest, I don't mind the unoriginality. Makes me one of the team, one of the boys. Most guys reckon I came in with some wild west show and got caught up in this hellhole. I ain't gonna tell them my life story, so I guess I'm an enigma. I kinda like that.

I signed up with the army and trained. Men couldn't hold a gun straight and still can't now. We shot at targets and charged at hay-filled dummies. Then that was over and we found ourselves on a short distance boat journey, and then we marched to the "Front". It's in France, and we're supposed to be pushing back, cause we're fighting against their neighbours, the Germans. It's real easy to make them the enemy. They speak a harsh language, that kind of grates on your ears. But you learn to hate these people without meeting them, in a totally different way to the way I hated Ross. It's like they ain't humans but something to be hated, and hunted down and killed in the most violent way you can get them. Ross was always human, if not vile and villainous.

The front is a series of trenches, the further in muddier and danker and sicker it is. And you blame the Germans. Cause they got the high ground and dug in and started this all off. There ain't no good facilities. Want to go to the latrine and you either risk being killed by bombing on the bog. Or dying from the stench. They mix it with quicklime Ma, and it stinks something awful. You see rats the size of cats, big, fat cats waddling around. They've been eating away at the bodies and they're fat on it, bulging even. The females see to more business than the ladies of thieves landing after a payday and the little bastards grow fat like their parents all too quickly. There ain't no shortage of their kind of meat.

There's a shitload of bodies rotting, between the two trenches we sometimes go out in the early morning, both sides to get the dead and dying. Early on, we thought that we could use horses. I've never seen such a waste. They go up against and charge the guns, and their legs get tangled and broken, and they panic and die, foaming at the mouth and crying out for mercy. I ended out there last week, and there was a dead horse out there, that struck me real sudden. You could see the whites of his eyes still large and scared. Then the guns started up again. And we had to leg it to our trench, but your legs get swamped by the mud. You could drown in the dirt here. I've seen horses consumed by it, and once or twice, I've had to give the mercy bullet to that horse that looks woefully at me, long eyelashes a batting cause there's stinking, bloody mud covering their eyes and long, solemn faces. Sometime you think they know exactly what's happening and they're glad when they see you levelling a gun at their head. Sometimes you get them falling down chasms gouged out from the bombing and they break their necks in the fall. Men die out here in droves too. But I guess I ain't affected by that, or perhaps I'm just already too used to death.

Men do go nuts though. Like I said, the training they gave them, too little. Don't prepare you for the realities, like forty-eight hour bombings (that's what drives them nuts, all that sleep they should be getting). Men get all twitchy, start seeing things, keep on hearing the bombs when nothing's coming. And they start to shake. That's what I don't like. I can't control that, or help them in anyway cept to get them to the medics. They didn't realize (Neither did I though) what it would be like out here. They didn't know what it was to live with corpses surrounding you or to run for your life, literally. Most men here have been leading fairly cushy lives so far, and that's just been very rudely interrupted. I feel real sorry for the boys out here. They're younger than me and they're exposed. I'm screwed up enough. I don't want to see what happens to them.

Germans don't only use guns and bombs though. They use gas too. Mustard and chlorine and all sorts of chemicals that hang in the air and kill everything that it touches, and it taints everything it touches with a green tinge. And we do it too, which I guess makes us just as bad as them, but they did it first. But that's the only difference. We have official masks, which sometimes work, and sometimes do shit-all. It's sometimes better to piss in a cloth, and cover your face and try to cover your hands in it. I've got some ugly marks on my hands Ma, from my first time, but I've learnt now, and it won't happen again. You see lines of men blinded hobbling back to shanty-town medical centres where they'll get a ticket home for the price of their eyes. They're the lucky ones. Chorine gets in your lungs, and reacts. Forms a bleach and acid and dissolves your insides. You move the dead after an attack like that, their insides fall out as you're moving them, all maroon and black and that tinge of green lying there like the sheen of sweat. But there's the mud too. You can't keep clean Ma. (You would have me sleeping outside if you saw me now). Lice run over your body in droves, under your uniform constantly biting and itching in all the uncomfortable places of your intimate self. In the endless waiting game for the next attack, it's quite the past time to pick them off and fry them over a flame. It's real satisfying when they shrivel and squeak. You get trench foot (My feet'll never be the same) which is when your feet swell, but your flesh and bone don't grow with it. It's all fluid caught under the skin that swells to the sides of your boots and stinks like rotting flesh. Leave it too late and it becomes sceptic and you can die from having dirty wet feet. I ain't lying Ma. I'm in deep.

I took off a sock yesterday, just to check how my feet were. The sock was almost squirming by itself; so many lice were living on it. My foot was getting to the aching stage, but it weren't green. I'll need to get it sorted out soon though.

All this time, after all this hurt and war and pain that I've seen, and all the dead bodies and piss-poor rations. I've found myself, least, I've found a form of belief… thought… I don't know how to describe it. I killed Ross. And that's hung heavy on my soul. Everyone will eventually pay for what they've done. And I've done more than that, you all ready know, those memories Ma, they're the one's that take hold of my heart and clench in anger and frustration. I was younger and stupid and real angry and sometimes real drunk on top of that, and I thought that I was managing just fine.

So is this my redemption? Going out and being killed here? If not with the constant bombing, or disease or gas or by bullet, and being buried in a far corner of a grassy field in an unmarked grave far, far away from you and Pa and Uncle.

Thing is I wanted to escape your graves and the wildness of the west. But that's what I yearn for now. I lie here, bruised and bodied and wet and hungry in a dug-out I can't stand up straight in, and I dream of the Great Plains, stretching out before me, golden grass buzzing with life. I can almost touch it here, in France. Just by broken tree, lying back and watching the road on a lazy afternoon, with a book in my hand and my trusty cattleman revolver, just in case.

Let this be my redemption. I'll go home and hang my riding spurs up on the wall. I'll tend to the ranch and pay off all of Pa's overhanging debts, and make the ranch into a ranch to rival McFarlane's. Instead of looking after cattle, which don't bring in much money, I'll start a trade by bringing in mustangs from the wild, and breaking them because there's some real money in racing and breeding the winners. I haven't done much to make you proud Ma, but I'm surviving and living, and I will eventually make you proud by falling into a life of mediocrity. This family don't need another hero to hang a curse on his loved ones heads, but instead a stable, reliable husband and father, to bring up the next generation and to teach them right from wrong. I realize that this now, was my Father's intention all along.

I shall honor him by following his wishes.

With all my love left to give, to Ma, Pa and to Sissy also,

Jack Marston.

* * *

><p>* AUTHORS NOTE*<p>

It's always played on me what happened after Jack took Ross' life. I always imagined he would seek purpose, to a young nineteen year-old (experienced as he is), war seems like a grand and amazing adventure, and it's far, far removed from the realities at home. I've always thought that he went to war and either went away, learning something from it, or prehaps he died in battle, in a shoot-out just as magnificent as his father's last stand. Ah...and any misspellings are obviously the product of Jack's self-taught education...

Thank you for taking the time to read my work.


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